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When they reached the tops of the pines the five sisters in the sky stretched forth their hands, and drew them in to live with them there in the sky for ever. And there, if you look, you may see the seven sisters together. You perhaps know them as the Pleiades, but the black fellows call them the Meamei.
A set of measurements from his photographs of nearly fifty stars in the Pleiades, and their comparison with Bessel's places, enabled Dr. Gould to announce, in 1866, that during the intervening third of a century no changes of importance had occurred in their relative positions. And Mr.
"How many stars are there in the Pleiades, anyway?" she asked with sudden imps of mirth in her eyes. Again she felt on safe ground, sure that she had conquered and put a too presuming male in his place. She had no idea that the laurels had been chiefly not hers at all but Alan Massey's, who was quite as wise as he boasted. But she kept her word and danced no more with Alan Massey that night.
He gave one long, yearning glance at the spangled sky where an inquisitive bat darted zigzag several times between himself and the Pleiades, that bunch of star-babies as yet unborn, as the blue-eyed guard used to call them. 'And I shall miss my supper and bed into the bargain! He turned reluctantly from his place beside the lime trees, and crossed the lawn now wet with dew.
There was a faint and much narrower extension which they could just make out beyond the Pleiades along the ecliptic, but the greater part of the Zodiacal Light showed as a broad truncated column, and it did not appear nearly as conical as he had before seen it.
There was a black interval of horror, and then this man found himself, clad in his underclothes, standing on the upturned car, looking up at the Pleiades and this thought in his mind, "What beauty and peace are in these winter heavens!" The calamity had come he was absolutely untouched he was locating the constellations and surprised and happy in his ability to enjoy them.
The Pleiades, for instance, they believe to be seven of their departed countrymen, fixed in the firmament; one eye of each of them appearing in the shape of a star, being the only part that is visible. But it is a common superstition among them, as we have already noticed, that the left eyes of their chiefs, after death, become stars.
Thus has the telescope traced the 'binding' influences of the Pleiades, loosened the bands of 'Orion' erst the chief nebulous hazy wonders, once and for all revealing its separate stars: and thus, in brief, has this wondrous instrument 'unrolled the heavens as a scroll. Yet even these astonishing results are as nothing to the fact, that those fantastic shapes which it has revealed in the depths of this lambo of creation, are not shapes merely of the present time that thousands of years have passed since the light that shewed them left the starry firmaments only now revealed that the telescope, in short, in reflecting these astonishing shapes, deliver to the eye of mind turned inward on the long-stored records of a universal and eternal memory of the past, than to a mere eye of sense looking outward on the things of passing time!
But is this what thou namest 'Mechanism of the Heavens, and 'System of the World; this, wherein Sirius and the Pleiades, and all Herschel's Fifteen thousand Suns per minute, being left out, some paltry handful of Moons, and inert Balls, had been looked at, nick-named, and marked in the Zodiacal Way-bill; so that we can now prate of their Whereabout; their How, their Why, their What, being hid from us, as in the signless Inane?
She put it beside her dressing-bag, and then went out once more into the night. Through the interlacing gum branches she saw a great coppery disk, and the moon rose slowly to be a lamp in her bridal chamber. How wonderful the stars were!... There was the Southern Cross with its pointers, and the Pleiades.
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